All this might sound like a heavy agenda to superimpose on these paintings, and it is a measure of Elwes' subtlety and command as a painter now that he can find so surely the technical ways and means to translate these apprehensions into a series of visual images that are at the same time direct and yet resonant with feeling. Beneath the great washes of colour that drift across some of the large canvases one senses, unmistakably, the traces and gleamings of the decorations that fill the walls of those underground/overground chapels, while the layers of paint surface upon paint surface in themselves provide a potent metaphor for the tantalising, obscuring effects of time and history on our understanding. They suggest too.the layering of memory. The poet Kathleen Raine complaining of our present education as "a language without a memory", observed that "the language of poets is a language of images upon which meanings are built, in metaphors and symbols which never lose their link with light and darkness, tree and flower, animals and rivers and mountains and stars and winds and the elements of earth, air, fire and water. The language of poetry in the language of nature". In a culture that is becoming increasingly amnesiac, our attention spans ever shorter, these paintings have the effect of engaging our attention with that same quality of quietude and passion that Luke Elwes first experienced in the Cappadocia landscapes.

Nicholas Usherwood
February 2000